Sunflower Field

“Wow, Mom! How did you do it!” I cried, full of genuine admiration and respect. “Years of diligence and sacrifice, my dear,” she answered with a sly smile. As usual.

I woke up and felt a familiar pain in my chest, and a thousand little bells rang in my ears. I could hardly breathe. I knew what it meant.

“Mom, I think I have a fever,” I called to my mother, full of hope. She touched my forehead and cheeks. “Yes, you have,” she whispered. I was excited. I wouldn’t have to go to nursery school. Anything was better than going to nursery school. Blood, sweat, and tears included.

Living with toxic pollution made me sick very often. The environment was at its worst in the ‘70s and ’80s. The air was saturated with dust and sulfur oxides. Acid rain fell; it burned the forests on the mountaintops. However, the communist regime decided to develop a strong population, so mothers were encouraged to let their few-week-old babies nap outside in the winter. My mother tried it, but she abandoned this custom when she realized that my originally snow-white blanket was covered with a grey sprinkle after two hours on the balcony. At the age of six months, I developed asthma; the problem wasn’t my weak immunity, but breathing a weak sulfuric acid that rose from the fog in the fall and winter.

I liked visiting the doctor; she was a young lady, and I felt she really wanted to help me. I loved her gentle care when she examined me with a stethoscope. It felt like a soft, hot cat’s paw touching my chest and back. The fancy treatment at that time, however, was antibiotics. When penicillin didn’t work, tetracycline was the next choice.

A special feature of my mother was her stubbornness; this ability made her stuff her violin into the bushes in front of her house and escape when she – as a little girl – had been forced to take part in music lessons. This ability helped her study mathematics in the ‘60s, when the common opinion was that the female brain was not smart enough for math. It also enabled her to leave teaching at the high school and start a career in IT – cybernetics, to use that time’s language. The best way to make her do something was to tell her that she was not allowed to.

She instinctively knew that I needed fresh air, not a treatment for syphilis. She had a big shoebox full of antibiotics she never gave me. She probably saved my second teeth because tetracycline, used at an age when teeth are developing, could destroy their strength and color. But this wasn’t known yet. She used traditional medicine instead: herbal mixtures, inhalations, or honey. Nobody could know about her secret box. Children didn’t belong to their family, community, or even themselves. They were literally the property of the state; being charged with bad care and losing a child was easy and common.

What also didn’t help was the constant presence of cigarette smoke. Everybody smoked—and everywhere. Bus drivers on buses. Travelers on trains. Guests in pubs. Even doctors in hospitals. Drinking alcohol was not allowed until the age of eighteen, but smoking was legal at sixteen. I still remember the smell of my parents’ work offices: a scent of paper, dust, typewriter oil, and cigarette smoke. I’m actually not sure why people living with such huge pollution made their environment even worse by smoking; maybe it was because cigarettes were an easily available pleasure and let them feel they were making a small, but their own, decision. The regime had no reason to fight against this unhealthy vice because there was an additional tax on each pack. “Money does not stink,” as Czech people say. My parents smoked like chimneys, and my brother started to smoke secretly at the age of fourteen.

This time, I was more seriously ill than I was used to. I lay weakly in my bed and tried to breathe economically to avoid pain.

Ding-dong! The doorbell rang. “Look who’s coming,” my mother smiled. Granny! Granny from the village came! I was happy again. Her appearance could mean only one thing: My mom couldn’t stay home with me anymore; she had to go back to work to take care of the computer EC1021. Granny was in charge of me.

Granny was born in 1914 and she remembered even worst and better times too. She was a retired primary school teacher, and I loved her stories and fairy tales. But mostly, she was an expert at making yeast dough. Her traditional Czech ‘kolaches’ could surely win any competition in Oklahoma or Texas, where Czech-Americans live. She never weighed anything, nor used any machine. She had an old tin bowl and a big wooden spoon. The main ingredients for her ‘kolaches’ were flour, sugar, butter, yeast, eggs from her own hens, and a little secret too: a bit of lard and lots of love.

Granny struggled with the dough outside of her own kitchen; something went wrong. Maybe the central heating produced a different heat than her little stove in the corner of the room at home. The dough probably didn’t like that heat. Maybe the eggs from the store were different. Maybe she missed her old bowl, or maybe her spell had no power once she crossed the invisible border behind her village. But finally, she succeeded. She made ‘kolaches’ quite similar to the ones at home. Our flat filled with the sweet scent of vanilla and butter.

But I wasn’t willing to open my eyes yet. I continued my attempts to minimize the need to breathe. I was pretty close to the discovery that humans don’t need to breathe at all. I could be stubborn too. “Let’s try something. We did it when I was young,” Granny suggested to my mother.

Interesting. I never knew that grannies were young too.

Granny heated oil, poured it on a small towel that she laid on my chest, and covered it with foil and another dry towel. “What is it, Granny?” I asked. “Sunflower oil,” she answered. “It will help you, for sure.”

Sunflower oil. Interesting again!

I remembered the sunflower field close to Granny’s village. Magnificent plants twice as tall as I was. Thousands of small suns turning their heads to the one glowing sun in the sky. Blue, blue sky and soft cotton clouds. And up, above the fields, a hero: a little lark. He quivered with his wings so close to the sun that he could have slightly burned his wings, like Icarus. And he sang. So loudly, so cheerfully and bravely. “I’m free! Free!” he called. “Who cares that life is hard when you can be free like that! Free!” “Okay, little bird. Maybe you are right. I will follow you to the next summer,” I smiled at him.

“Wow! Granny! Mom! How did you do it?” I opened my eyes when I found the pain in my chest had disappeared. Of course, I had expected the “diligence and sacrifice” claim. But my mom and Granny said nothing. They weren’t able to speak for a while. Then Granny ran and brought me a ‘kolache’ with a poppy-seed filling.

The wave of the 1989 November revolutions behind Iron Curtain rose on the Berlin Wall on November 9^th and hit Czechoslovakia on November 17^th, when police brutally beat protesting students in Prague. But my personal history says that protests started on November 11^th in my neighborhood; people met in the town square, and they called not only for freedom but for breathable air. And the mayor and local communist leaders had no courage to suppress the rebellion.